According to Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), to be ‘at it like rabbits’ means to have lots of sex, which most likely stems from the fact that bunnies are rampant reproducers with a gestation period of just one month. It’s what most parents dread is true of their own child. And perhaps what most pupils at some point in their school careers will imagine all of their friends are doing, with the exception of themselves.
It’s therefore ironic that in the 1950s, anecdotal evidence suggests that the reproductive systems of rabbits were studied in a session that more or less constituted most pupils’ entire sex education. In 1951, a sex ed video in the UK explained pregnancy to girls through the use of farm animals. Perhaps worse, pupils would have observed how plants were pollinated and as a result were expected to be sexually and emotionally mature, able to navigate the trials and tribulations of sex and relationships through puberty and into adulthood. This is, surely, the point of sex education.
Yet in many cases, sex education veers alarmingly off course. These stories might sound prehistoric, but my anxiety about the state of modern sex education in England really started keeping me up at the night when I began to ask my friends what their experiences of the subject at school had been. One response from someone who left school in 2012 stuck in my head: “I never had it. We did fertilisation in biology. But I never heard the word period, penis or porn the whole time I was there.” Even in the noughties, in some schools, sex education was a sub-category of biology. This makes the advent of compulsory sex education in England from September 2020 all the more pertinent. With youth mental health issues on the rise, to think that some students still leave secondary school without proper sex education is terrifying. School is a breeding ground for both sex and relationships, yet some of those very same institutions have, until this point, been blissfully irresponsible for the sexual welfare of the children they teach. The appetite for change, though, has been growing slowly but surely for decades.
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May 2020